So you're saying that the US would rather go to the extent of engaging in embargos rather than comply with a ruling of the WTO? An organization to which they are a founding member? How arrogant and hypocritical that would be.
Dude, have you been watching the news for the past five years? The U.S. has been doing this sort of thing constantly. The U.N., the land mine treaty, the anti-missile treaty with Russia, the ICC, the Geneva convention, Kyoto, Canadian lumber... all things that the US (under previous administrations) was involved in creating or promoting, and that the current administration feels free to ignore. "Arrogant and hypocritical" is no obstacle for Bush and Cheney.
Which brings us right back to the debate about why we need the damn machines in the first place.
The fact is, we don't need them. They can still be useful as a faster way of marking your ballot than by hand with a pen, because they can check to make sure you didn't make mistakes (overvote, undervote, etc), and they are useful for people with handicaps (e.g. impaired vision, arthritis).
In any event, at a minimum I would expect any proposed design for a voting machine to be: A. Completely open (both hardware and software), B. Have a method of guaranteeing that the published code is actually being used in every machine, and C. In no way involve Diebold, Congress, or any other known criminal organization or class.
I think you are approaching it the wrong way. There will never be a 100% bulletproof method for ensuring that a piece of electronic equipment will operate the way it was specified to operate, no matter how "open" the software is alleged to be. Instead, assume every electronic device is suspect and demand that the design is such that the electronics don't need to be trusted. In particular, make sure that the only output from the electronic device is an easily human readable marked paper ballot, and have the voter examine the ballot for correctness and manually place it in the ballot box. Once you've done that, it doesn't matter how corrupt or suspect the voting machine is... the worst it can do is piss the voter off when he realizes that it didn't mark what he told it to mark -- at which point the voting machine company will have a nice scandal on its hands, but no elections will be compromised. This step is key -- the electronics will never be trustworthy, but this way they don't have to be.
This immutable authority is most easily done as a paper trail. The paper can be shown to users through a piece of glass, and once confirmed, be fed into a locked audit box. Unfortunately even this is still vulnerable to a malicious machine continuing on to forge votes between users and feeding those votes into the box. At least the machine couldn't delete existing votes, it would only be able to add to them, and that would show up as more votes registered than votes cast.
The above flaws are easily fixed.... make sure that the voting machine doesn't have direct access to the ballot box. Instead, the voting machine gives the ballot to the voter, and if the voter is satisfied with the ballot, the voter places the ballot in the ballot box. The voting machine then is just a more convenient way of filling out the ballot by hand (which is also still an option for people who don't trust machines at all). There is now no way that the voting machine can tamper with the votes at all.
In any event, this is true of *every* voting system known. Consider the traditional paper scheme. You vote for Al Gore. It prints out "George W. Bush". You push "cancel". It drops the vote in the box. Now what?
It doesn't "drop the vote in the box". It prints out the vote onto a ballot, and gives you the ballot to look at. If the markings on the ballot are what you intended, YOU drop the ballot in the box. If not, you go to the election official, tell them that the ballot was printed incorrectly, have them void that ballot and give you a new one. If the same thing happens again, get a third ballot and fill it out by hand with a pen. See, no problem!
Again, I'm saying cryptographic schemes can provide the same assurances the "drop paper in a box" system can.
Maybe you, as someone who understands and trusts cryptography, will feel assured. Your grandmother most certainly will not, she'll only feel confused and suspicious.
Individual voters can be assured that their vote was counted.
Assured how? At the end of the day, all you have is a piece of paper with a number on it. You are still just taking the election officials at their word that your number means something about the election.
And even if the system works perfectly, what happens when people start complaining that the system defrauded them? (And they will do so, people cry foul every time their guy loses an election that they think he should have won). How will you convince them that the system really hasn't been compromised? Any explanation that relies on them understanding cryptographic principles is a sure loser, because to most people that will sound like so much gobbledygook, which is just what they would expect to hear from someone who is attempting to fool them. So essentially you will be reduced to "trust us, we're mathematicians", which is not nearly as convincing to most people as "we had people from all the politicial parties sit in a room together and re-count the votes by hand, and all of them agree that this tally is correct".
Did you read anything I wrote. That's simply *IMPOSSIBLE*. The tickets don't say whose they are, so there's no way their son can prove which ticket is his.
Does it much matter whose ticket it is? If the ticket proves that somebody voted for Mr. Millionaire, and tickets are impractical to forge, then Mr. Millionaire will pay the $100 bribe in return for any ticket that indicates a vote for him. Perhaps a few people will try to swap tickets with someone else in order to vote for who they want and still get the $100 bribe, but many people would just do the easy thing and vote for Mr. Millionaire, take the ticket they are issued, and collect their $100. Enough people to swing the election to Mr. Millionaire, anyway.
If it makes you happy, imagine there's a button on the machine that says "coercion" on it. When you press it, it generates one vote for each candidate and one "I created a vote for each candidate" vote. You are given a receipt for every single one of those votes, all indistinguishable from a regular receipt.
Okay, but doesn't that defeat the purpose? If I have receipts showing I voted for all five candidates, how can I prove to myself which one my vote was actually counted for?
Civilian casualties are a fact of war. At the US military does as much as possible to avoid them.
Yeah, and guess what happens when "as much as possible" just isn't enough? You end up killing a lot of civilians anyway, and so a large portion of the local population turns against you because they are tired of being killed by you, and you counter that by killing even more people (civilians or otherwise), and the whole bloody cycle continues indefinitely until you've had enough and decide to leave.
It doesn't much matter at this point how determined or careful the US military is in Iraq. What they are attempting to do simply isn't possible anymore, if it ever was. Withdrawal is inevitable; the only question left is whether we cut our losses now, or bleed money and lives for a few more years first.
Every compiler I have ever used has a pretty good spell checker built right in--in fact, not only does it spelling matter, but the syntax must be correct too. A spell check for programming seems like a waste of time.
The compiler only checks to see if the name in the code matches the name in the declaration. It won't catch any typos that are in both places (e.g. because the programmer can't spell). The suggestion here is to check the names against an English dictionary (somehow).
It sounds like Wi-Max will be available soon, and will be able to provide wide-area coverage without requiring nearly as many base stations. Perhaps this is one reason why companies are suddenly deciding that big Wi-fi projects are a bad idea... because after investing $$$$ on thousands of Wi-fi stations, the competition will next year be able to take their customers away by installing just a few dozen Wi-max stations?
Because they were told by a guy they believed was watching them that there was a bomb in the store and if they tried to leave, he would blow it up. Even if there wasn't a bomb, there have in the past been bombs put in places. It's enough to make them reluctant to call his bluff.
Wasn't this the plot to "Die Hard", or something? Besides, I thought that post-9/11 we were all supposed to assume that the "terrists" will kill us no matter what, and not to bother trying to appease them....:^P
I did... and a very large scale roll-out of wind and solar would yield significant amounts of energy (albeit not at a high energy density). Honestly, outside of nuclear power, it's not clear what other "high yielding, carbon-free energy sources" there are. Hydroelectric? Fine, but most of the places where you could put a dam, already have a dam... there isn't much room for growth there.
Right, because if I disagree with you on environmental policy, obviously I must find Bush convincing.
No, but since you've pre-determined that most environmentalists are control freaks with an ulterior motive, I needed to find someone who is clearly not an environmentalist to present the opposing view... otherwise you'd just dismiss it our of hand as a sinister attempt to control your life. So, does Bush's position have merit, or does it not?
For someone critical of caricatures, you'd do well not to attribute to me the position that fission is "perfectly safe". More generally, you should recognize that nothing is perfectly safe, and by holding any technology you already decided you don't like, to that standard, you are becoming the caricature.
You're right, the actual question is: is it "safe enough" for people to want to use it? Between the potential for nuclear proliferation, the potential for nuclear terrorism, the potential for nuclear accidents, and the problems with safe long-term storage of radioactive waste, the answer IMHO is "only as a last resort".
However, if we are to take a more common sense view of what you meant, such as "the overwhelming majority of environmentalists" or "the most visible, credible environmental groups", then I believe my statement holds. Can you name even one notable environmentalist who thinks any amount of carbon emissions is okay, as long as the emitter pays to have it sunk? No? Then you agree that for most of them, controlling others is more important than protecting the environment.
As far as "any amount" of carbon emissions, that's an ambiguous phrase. Are you asking about whether it's okay to sequester any carbon at all (i.e. greater than zero), or a potentially infinite amount? If the former, I doubt you'd find many environmentalists who didn't approve, as long as the sequestration process is effective at keeping the carbon out of the atmosphere. (your challenge: find me a significant environmentalist who wants to outlaw carbon sequestration. No? Then you agree that most environmentalists are concerned with -- gasp -- protecting the environment.... and that your paranoia is unjustified). If the latter, then it's a silly question to ask: nobody is going to say "yes, I hereby give you the okay to emit an infinite amount of carbon forever, regardless of the consequences".
Environmentalists typically claim that the nuclear power option isn't safe because it could get into the hands of terrorists. But if you can count that as a reason to be unsafe, it's unclear how *any* high-yielding energy source, including the hypothetical one you listed, can ever count as safe. You might as well ask for a knife that can only cut during surgical operations, but can't be used to kill someone.
Well, wind and solar power would make the cut... it's hard to imagine Osama taking out a city with those. As far as why people are against fission reactors... why not ask the Bush administration why they are against Iran having them? Bush is clearly no wild-eyed environmentalist, so if fission technology is "perfectly safe", why can't Iran have some?
Environmentalists don't even care if you'll sink your emissions right out of the air, or pay the full externality; they think you shouldn't do it, except as they dictate. How can you reconcile that with a genuine concern for the environment rather than controlling people?
That's easy enough to explain -- you're fighting against a straw man. Yes -- for any energy technology, you will find someone making an argument against it on environmental grounds. But then, you can find someone to argue against anything for any asinine reason -- that's what the Internet is for, isn't it? That doesn't mean that every argument on environmental ground is (a) valid or (b) representative of "what environmentalists all think". In fact, it's not clear that there even is such a thing as "what all environmentalists think". Outside of concern for the environment, their views are going to differ widely on any number of subjects. That's true for any large group of people.
So to sum up: of course what you envision as "environmentalists" are irrational and controlling. That's because you're envisioning a caricature. Stop cherry-picking the cranks and assuming they represent the entire movement.
If it replaces an equivalent amount of carbon-generating energy production, and leads to a reduction in carbon output, then of course it can. Global warming has almost nothing to do with how much electricity is generated or created, and everything to do with how much carbon is pumped into the atmosphere.
GW isn't a science problem anymore, it is a political/religious problem and thus immune to facts. The only 'solution' to GW is massive government intervention in the market and everyone's lives. i.e. Socialism. Any proposed solution that doesn't include the all important Socialism component will be instantly rejected by 100% of the GW Cult.
Only in your propaganda-addled mind. Here's a little thought experiment for you: imagine the physics wizards at ITER have a major breakthrough that leads to an inexpensive, safe fusion reactor that can provide cheap electricity for all without any carbon emissions. Now imagine all the environmentalists rejecting that technology because it doesn't allow them to properly "control your life". Does that scenario sound ridiculous to you? If not, please adjust your tinfoil hat, it is on too tight.
I work in a wafer fab, specifically in Etch. Contrary to popular belief, it is NOT clean industry, but rather extremely dirty and toxic. Some of the chemicals used in my specific fab for etching alone (both wet and dry etch) include:
The question is, what happens to these nasty materials once they are used? Do they become part of the product and get shipped out the door? Do they get hosed off and recycled for the next batch? Perhaps they get neutralized somehow? Or are they just dumped into the local river?
How exactly are the toxic materials handled? And what is their final effect on the environment, especially compared to the effects of mining and burning an equivalent amount of coal?
Of course we realize--they cannot pay for infinite overproduction, as they have no use beyond demand... -but under the system you mention there's not much incentive for average people to bother with a solar grid-die system at all.
I mostly agree with you, but there is one big incentive to tie your solar system to the grid -- by doing that you get to use the grid as an enormous energy buffering system. Without tying to the grid, you'd have to buy a bank of (expensive and unreliable) batteries to buffer up the excess solar energy, so that when you are consuming more than you are producing (e.g. at night) your appliances would still work. And even then you'd be screwed if your average consumption was more than your average production, since eventually your batteries would be fully discharged and your house would go dark. With the grid tied in, OTOH, you just always generate as much as you can, and rely on the electric utility to fill in the remainder.
I don't remember the Democrats OR the republicans bitching when Clinton fired all the Republican district att's and replaced them with Democrats. It was normal, and is expected by both parties
I shouldn't even have to post this, because anyone still spewing the above bullshit obviously already knows the answer and is just blowing smoke, but just in case anyone else was wondering: Replacing all the political appointees as part of coming into office is traditional. Replacing in the middle of a term, only those attorney generals who prosecuted Republicans, or refused to prosecute Democrats is what's scandalous here. The Justice Department had a long history of being largely independant and non-partisan, and that is what was ruined by the Bush administration. That is not normal, nor expected, and that is why morale at the Justice Department is at an all-time low, with scores of senior staff leaving. Allowing that to continue would result in a country without rule of law, only political persecution of the party not in power, by the party in power.
If you and your ilk march on with your demand for failure, political will may very well fall short - especially if your buddies in the media succeed in squelching a rebound in public support as progress is being made. With an annual GDP of over 13 trillion dollars, physical ability to keep tempo is not in question, it all comes back to political will.
I wouldn't say that me and "my ilk" demand failure so much as recognize it when we see it.
As far as whether "progress is being made", or not, don't take my word for it (or the White House's, for that matter): Instead, read what the soldiers themselves are saying.
Yes, I do think it will eventually be a success. And yes, I did think the same thing 12, 24 and 36 months ago, because I know what nearly everyone else in DC knows but takes care not to say: anti-insurgency campaigns like the one we're engaged in now typically require about 10 years to achieve success.
You're assuming that America is (a) politically willing and (b) physically able to "stay the course" for 10 years. It seems more likely to me that we'll be out of there in the next 2-3 years, either because the military no longer has the logistical ability to do its job there, or because the American people (who are tired of being lied to, as you tacitly admit they have been for the last 3 years) demand it.
If Bush was committing America to 10+ years of occupying Iraq, he should have said so up front, instead of saying it would be "weeks or months, not years". Then maybe Americans (and the rest of the world) would be more willing to listen to him now.
I'm sure you're just annoyed and dismayed that things appear to be turning to shit over there, what with the surge beginning to work, locals turning against the terrorists, and whatnot. But don't worry, little liberal fella! While Iraq may end up being a success for the US (Dang it all to Hell!), the future undoubtedly holds some other thing you can use to justify some more self loathing!
Do you really think Iraq is going to be a success? If so, did you think that 12 months ago, when Iraq was "just turning the corner"? How about 24 months ago, when there were just "a few dead-enders" left? Or 36 months ago, when it was all just a matter of weeks until everything was hunky-dory?
The fact is, there is no military solution in Iraq, only a political one. And right now, the political situation in Iraq is as bad as it's ever been, if not worse. All our military can do is chase insurgents from one province to another and try to keep the lid on the civil war for a bit longer. Perhaps if they're really lucky, they can keep the real shit from hitting the fan until 2009, at which point you can blame the newly elected Democratic president for "losing Iraq". That appears to be Bush's sole exit strategy at the moment.
But if blasting "self-loathing liberals" on Slashdot will make you feel better, go ahead. Just don't expect it to help, and don't expect anything different out of Iraq than what you've been seeing already. There's a difference between "supporting the troops" and "complete denial of reality".
And I wonder, can he be beaten? Is America going to have another Republican president?
I'd say the Democrats are likely to win, because the Republican Party has been using too many "by any means necessary" political strategies that helped them in the short run, at the cost of completely ruining their credibility in the long term. Maybe by 2012 the American people will have forgotten enough of the crap they've suffered through over the last few years, but I seriously doubt they will have by next year. People no longer pay much attention to the Republican smear machine, they just take it for granted that the Republicans will do or say anything to demonize their opponents.
To quote Abraham Lincoln: "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time". At this point, the Republicans only have the support of that first group remaining.
How is that possible? Emulation will always be slower than the real thing.
Presumably "performs like Intels" meant "does similar tasks at a similar speed", not "executes x86 binaries with an emulator". You'll need to recompile your source code to a SPARC binary.
HOW F*CKING HARD is it to make a secure voting machine?!?
Pretty f*cking hard, I expect. The problem is roughly equivalent to making a secure DRM system, which everyone on Slashdot claims is near-impossible. In both cases, you need to give someone physical access to the machine and its contents, and yet somehow prevent them from secretly modifying the machine's behavior to suit their liking.
We're still debating gravity, we're still debating inertia, we're debating light as a particle or wave. That's science.
Where, exactly, is anyone still debating whether or not gravity, inertia, or light exist? We might still be discussing the details of how they work, but if you were to go around saying any of those was a myth you'd be ridiculed, and rightly so.
To paraphrase, we know gravity is real, so NO MORE DEBATE ABOUT IT.:^)
Solar cells are nice, but once you factor in the environmental cost of production they're not efficient. [...] go nukes.
Nukes are nice, but once you factor in the political costs (proliferation) they're not efficient. Once everybody has nuclear technology, how much cheap power would the world have to generate to offset the costs of the occasional nuclear war?
I would think that 3D games would be considered a 'real time task' (i.e. you must draw the next frame within 1/30th of a second or else it won't look right), and therefore you would want to run them using the real time scheduler (SCHED_FIFO or SCHED_RR). Given that, it wouldn't much matter what fancy scheduling algorithms the non-real-time tasks were using.... your game would always get the cycles it needs when it needs them (up to to the CPU's capacity, of course).
Perhaps people just don't want to run their games as root though....
Someone please explain to me why the Toyota chose the Prius to be its hybird? The prius is the ugliest car they make. It looks like a damn turtle with those tiny little wheels (you know, just like the wheels on a turtle).
One of the reasons the Prius looks the way it does (and has the tiny wheels it has) is because the engineers designing the Prius wanted to maximize fuel efficiency. To do that, they gave it an aerodynamic shape and low-rolling-resistance tires, etc etc. You may think it's ugly, but it looks like it does for a reason. (Personally, I think it looks pretty cool).
Slashdot Mirror
Dude, have you been watching the news for the past five years? The U.S. has been doing this sort of thing constantly. The U.N., the land mine treaty, the anti-missile treaty with Russia, the ICC, the Geneva convention, Kyoto, Canadian lumber... all things that the US (under previous administrations) was involved in creating or promoting, and that the current administration feels free to ignore. "Arrogant and hypocritical" is no obstacle for Bush and Cheney.
The fact is, we don't need them. They can still be useful as a faster way of marking your ballot than by hand with a pen, because they can check to make sure you didn't make mistakes (overvote, undervote, etc), and they are useful for people with handicaps (e.g. impaired vision, arthritis).
In any event, at a minimum I would expect any proposed design for a voting machine to be:
A. Completely open (both hardware and software),
B. Have a method of guaranteeing that the published code is actually being used in every machine, and
C. In no way involve Diebold, Congress, or any other known criminal organization or class.
I think you are approaching it the wrong way. There will never be a 100% bulletproof method for ensuring that a piece of electronic equipment will operate the way it was specified to operate, no matter how "open" the software is alleged to be. Instead, assume every electronic device is suspect and demand that the design is such that the electronics don't need to be trusted. In particular, make sure that the only output from the electronic device is an easily human readable marked paper ballot, and have the voter examine the ballot for correctness and manually place it in the ballot box. Once you've done that, it doesn't matter how corrupt or suspect the voting machine is... the worst it can do is piss the voter off when he realizes that it didn't mark what he told it to mark -- at which point the voting machine company will have a nice scandal on its hands, but no elections will be compromised. This step is key -- the electronics will never be trustworthy, but this way they don't have to be.
The above flaws are easily fixed.... make sure that the voting machine doesn't have direct access to the ballot box. Instead, the voting machine gives the ballot to the voter, and if the voter is satisfied with the ballot, the voter places the ballot in the ballot box. The voting machine then is just a more convenient way of filling out the ballot by hand (which is also still an option for people who don't trust machines at all). There is now no way that the voting machine can tamper with the votes at all.
It doesn't "drop the vote in the box". It prints out the vote onto a ballot, and gives you the ballot to look at. If the markings on the ballot are what you intended, YOU drop the ballot in the box. If not, you go to the election official, tell them that the ballot was printed incorrectly, have them void that ballot and give you a new one. If the same thing happens again, get a third ballot and fill it out by hand with a pen. See, no problem!
Again, I'm saying cryptographic schemes can provide the same assurances the "drop paper in a box" system can.
Maybe you, as someone who understands and trusts cryptography, will feel assured. Your grandmother most certainly will not, she'll only feel confused and suspicious.
Assured how? At the end of the day, all you have is a piece of paper with a number on it. You are still just taking the election officials at their word that your number means something about the election.
And even if the system works perfectly, what happens when people start complaining that the system defrauded them? (And they will do so, people cry foul every time their guy loses an election that they think he should have won). How will you convince them that the system really hasn't been compromised? Any explanation that relies on them understanding cryptographic principles is a sure loser, because to most people that will sound like so much gobbledygook, which is just what they would expect to hear from someone who is attempting to fool them. So essentially you will be reduced to "trust us, we're mathematicians", which is not nearly as convincing to most people as "we had people from all the politicial parties sit in a room together and re-count the votes by hand, and all of them agree that this tally is correct".
Does it much matter whose ticket it is? If the ticket proves that somebody voted for Mr. Millionaire, and tickets are impractical to forge, then Mr. Millionaire will pay the $100 bribe in return for any ticket that indicates a vote for him. Perhaps a few people will try to swap tickets with someone else in order to vote for who they want and still get the $100 bribe, but many people would just do the easy thing and vote for Mr. Millionaire, take the ticket they are issued, and collect their $100. Enough people to swing the election to Mr. Millionaire, anyway.
If it makes you happy, imagine there's a button on the machine that says "coercion" on it. When you press it, it generates one vote for each candidate and one "I created a vote for each candidate" vote. You are given a receipt for every single one of those votes, all indistinguishable from a regular receipt.
Okay, but doesn't that defeat the purpose? If I have receipts showing I voted for all five candidates, how can I prove to myself which one my vote was actually counted for?
Yeah, and guess what happens when "as much as possible" just isn't enough? You end up killing a lot of civilians anyway, and so a large portion of the local population turns against you because they are tired of being killed by you, and you counter that by killing even more people (civilians or otherwise), and the whole bloody cycle continues indefinitely until you've had enough and decide to leave.
It doesn't much matter at this point how determined or careful the US military is in Iraq. What they are attempting to do simply isn't possible anymore, if it ever was. Withdrawal is inevitable; the only question left is whether we cut our losses now, or bleed money and lives for a few more years first.
The compiler only checks to see if the name in the code matches the name in the declaration. It won't catch any typos that are in both places (e.g. because the programmer can't spell). The suggestion here is to check the names against an English dictionary (somehow).
It sounds like Wi-Max will be available soon, and will be able to provide wide-area coverage without requiring nearly as many base stations. Perhaps this is one reason why companies are suddenly deciding that big Wi-fi projects are a bad idea... because after investing $$$$ on thousands of Wi-fi stations, the competition will next year be able to take their customers away by installing just a few dozen Wi-max stations?
Wasn't this the plot to "Die Hard", or something? Besides, I thought that post-9/11 we were all supposed to assume that the "terrists" will kill us no matter what, and not to bother trying to appease them....
I did... and a very large scale roll-out of wind and solar would yield significant amounts of energy (albeit not at a high energy density). Honestly, outside of nuclear power, it's not clear what other "high yielding, carbon-free energy sources" there are. Hydroelectric? Fine, but most of the places where you could put a dam, already have a dam... there isn't much room for growth there.
Right, because if I disagree with you on environmental policy, obviously I must find Bush convincing.
No, but since you've pre-determined that most environmentalists are control freaks with an ulterior motive, I needed to find someone who is clearly not an environmentalist to present the opposing view... otherwise you'd just dismiss it our of hand as a sinister attempt to control your life. So, does Bush's position have merit, or does it not?
For someone critical of caricatures, you'd do well not to attribute to me the position that fission is "perfectly safe". More generally, you should recognize that nothing is perfectly safe, and by holding any technology you already decided you don't like, to that standard, you are becoming the caricature.
You're right, the actual question is: is it "safe enough" for people to want to use it? Between the potential for nuclear proliferation, the potential for nuclear terrorism, the potential for nuclear accidents, and the problems with safe long-term storage of radioactive waste, the answer IMHO is "only as a last resort".
However, if we are to take a more common sense view of what you meant, such as "the overwhelming majority of environmentalists" or "the most visible, credible environmental groups", then I believe my statement holds. Can you name even one notable environmentalist who thinks any amount of carbon emissions is okay, as long as the emitter pays to have it sunk? No? Then you agree that for most of them, controlling others is more important than protecting the environment.
Here you go: Environmental Defense Praises Carbon Sequestration Incentive Act
As far as "any amount" of carbon emissions, that's an ambiguous phrase. Are you asking about whether it's okay to sequester any carbon at all (i.e. greater than zero), or a potentially infinite amount? If the former, I doubt you'd find many environmentalists who didn't approve, as long as the sequestration process is effective at keeping the carbon out of the atmosphere. (your challenge: find me a significant environmentalist who wants to outlaw carbon sequestration. No? Then you agree that most environmentalists are concerned with -- gasp -- protecting the environment.... and that your paranoia is unjustified). If the latter, then it's a silly question to ask: nobody is going to say "yes, I hereby give you the okay to emit an infinite amount of carbon forever, regardless of the consequences".
Well, wind and solar power would make the cut... it's hard to imagine Osama taking out a city with those. As far as why people are against fission reactors... why not ask the Bush administration why they are against Iran having them? Bush is clearly no wild-eyed environmentalist, so if fission technology is "perfectly safe", why can't Iran have some?
Environmentalists don't even care if you'll sink your emissions right out of the air, or pay the full externality; they think you shouldn't do it, except as they dictate. How can you reconcile that with a genuine concern for the environment rather than controlling people?
That's easy enough to explain -- you're fighting against a straw man. Yes -- for any energy technology, you will find someone making an argument against it on environmental grounds. But then, you can find someone to argue against anything for any asinine reason -- that's what the Internet is for, isn't it? That doesn't mean that every argument on environmental ground is (a) valid or (b) representative of "what environmentalists all think". In fact, it's not clear that there even is such a thing as "what all environmentalists think". Outside of concern for the environment, their views are going to differ widely on any number of subjects. That's true for any large group of people.
So to sum up: of course what you envision as "environmentalists" are irrational and controlling. That's because you're envisioning a caricature. Stop cherry-picking the cranks and assuming they represent the entire movement.
If it replaces an equivalent amount of carbon-generating energy production, and leads to a reduction in carbon output, then of course it can. Global warming has almost nothing to do with how much electricity is generated or created, and everything to do with how much carbon is pumped into the atmosphere.
GW isn't a science problem anymore, it is a political/religious problem and thus immune to facts. The only 'solution' to GW is massive government intervention in the market and everyone's lives. i.e. Socialism. Any proposed solution that doesn't include the all important Socialism component will be instantly rejected by 100% of the GW Cult.
Only in your propaganda-addled mind. Here's a little thought experiment for you: imagine the physics wizards at ITER have a major breakthrough that leads to an inexpensive, safe fusion reactor that can provide cheap electricity for all without any carbon emissions. Now imagine all the environmentalists rejecting that technology because it doesn't allow them to properly "control your life". Does that scenario sound ridiculous to you? If not, please adjust your tinfoil hat, it is on too tight.
The question is, what happens to these nasty materials once they are used? Do they become part of the product and get shipped out the door? Do they get hosed off and recycled for the next batch? Perhaps they get neutralized somehow? Or are they just dumped into the local river?
How exactly are the toxic materials handled? And what is their final effect on the environment, especially compared to the effects of mining and burning an equivalent amount of coal?
I mostly agree with you, but there is one big incentive to tie your solar system to the grid -- by doing that you get to use the grid as an enormous energy buffering system. Without tying to the grid, you'd have to buy a bank of (expensive and unreliable) batteries to buffer up the excess solar energy, so that when you are consuming more than you are producing (e.g. at night) your appliances would still work. And even then you'd be screwed if your average consumption was more than your average production, since eventually your batteries would be fully discharged and your house would go dark. With the grid tied in, OTOH, you just always generate as much as you can, and rely on the electric utility to fill in the remainder.
I shouldn't even have to post this, because anyone still spewing the above bullshit obviously already knows the answer and is just blowing smoke, but just in case anyone else was wondering: Replacing all the political appointees as part of coming into office is traditional. Replacing in the middle of a term, only those attorney generals who prosecuted Republicans, or refused to prosecute Democrats is what's scandalous here. The Justice Department had a long history of being largely independant and non-partisan, and that is what was ruined by the Bush administration. That is not normal, nor expected, and that is why morale at the Justice Department is at an all-time low, with scores of senior staff leaving. Allowing that to continue would result in a country without rule of law, only political persecution of the party not in power, by the party in power.
I wouldn't say that me and "my ilk" demand failure so much as recognize it when we see it.
As far as whether "progress is being made", or not, don't take my word for it (or the White House's, for that matter): Instead, read what the soldiers themselves are saying.
You're assuming that America is (a) politically willing and (b) physically able to "stay the course" for 10 years. It seems more likely to me that we'll be out of there in the next 2-3 years, either because the military no longer has the logistical ability to do its job there, or because the American people (who are tired of being lied to, as you tacitly admit they have been for the last 3 years) demand it.
If Bush was committing America to 10+ years of occupying Iraq, he should have said so up front, instead of saying it would be "weeks or months, not years". Then maybe Americans (and the rest of the world) would be more willing to listen to him now.
Do you really think Iraq is going to be a success? If so, did you think that 12 months ago, when Iraq was "just turning the corner"? How about 24 months ago, when there were just "a few dead-enders" left? Or 36 months ago, when it was all just a matter of weeks until everything was hunky-dory?
The fact is, there is no military solution in Iraq, only a political one. And right now, the political situation in Iraq is as bad as it's ever been, if not worse. All our military can do is chase insurgents from one province to another and try to keep the lid on the civil war for a bit longer. Perhaps if they're really lucky, they can keep the real shit from hitting the fan until 2009, at which point you can blame the newly elected Democratic president for "losing Iraq". That appears to be Bush's sole exit strategy at the moment.
But if blasting "self-loathing liberals" on Slashdot will make you feel better, go ahead. Just don't expect it to help, and don't expect anything different out of Iraq than what you've been seeing already. There's a difference between "supporting the troops" and "complete denial of reality".
I'd say the Democrats are likely to win, because the Republican Party has been using too many "by any means necessary" political strategies that helped them in the short run, at the cost of completely ruining their credibility in the long term. Maybe by 2012 the American people will have forgotten enough of the crap they've suffered through over the last few years, but I seriously doubt they will have by next year. People no longer pay much attention to the Republican smear machine, they just take it for granted that the Republicans will do or say anything to demonize their opponents.
To quote Abraham Lincoln: "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time". At this point, the Republicans only have the support of that first group remaining.
Presumably "performs like Intels" meant "does similar tasks at a similar speed", not "executes x86 binaries with an emulator". You'll need to recompile your source code to a SPARC binary.
Pretty f*cking hard, I expect. The problem is roughly equivalent to making a secure DRM system, which everyone on Slashdot claims is near-impossible. In both cases, you need to give someone physical access to the machine and its contents, and yet somehow prevent them from secretly modifying the machine's behavior to suit their liking.
Where, exactly, is anyone still debating whether or not gravity, inertia, or light exist? We might still be discussing the details of how they work, but if you were to go around saying any of those was a myth you'd be ridiculed, and rightly so.
To paraphrase, we know gravity is real, so NO MORE DEBATE ABOUT IT.
Solar cells are nice, but once you factor in the environmental cost of production they're not efficient. [...] go nukes.
Nukes are nice, but once you factor in the political costs (proliferation) they're not efficient. Once everybody has nuclear technology, how much cheap power would the world have to generate to offset the costs of the occasional nuclear war?
Perhaps people just don't want to run their games as root though....
One of the reasons the Prius looks the way it does (and has the tiny wheels it has) is because the engineers designing the Prius wanted to maximize fuel efficiency. To do that, they gave it an aerodynamic shape and low-rolling-resistance tires, etc etc. You may think it's ugly, but it looks like it does for a reason. (Personally, I think it looks pretty cool).